Littoral

I believe the ocean remembers more than the archives do. I believe its remembering is a kind of justice that cannot be erased, rolling forward in salt that stings and cleans in the same breath, reminding us that healing and reckoning move in the same tide.

I believe every wave is a witness, that the water keeps count of every name that was taken. I believe the wind still carries their syllables inland, pressing them into our mouths each time we speak of freedom.

I believe I come from those who crossed unwilling and still crossed— from the ones who refused to vanish the way history required, from the ones who turned rope into rhythm, hunger into song. I believe their music still hums in the undertow when I am tired.

I believe forgetting is not survival; it is surrender. And I believe survival without memory is no survival at all, because I’ve seen comfort scab over a wound and dare to call itself healing while the bleeding goes on.

⸻

I believe the Atlantic is not a border but a sentence unfinished, its subject and verb still searching beneath the foam. I was born to finish that sentence with my own mouth— to make language out of water, and vow out of breath.

The sea does not forgive. And that’s all right. Forgiveness was never asked for. What the dead wanted was this: that we tell the truth with the same force that tried to silence it. I know the body keeps the weather of its ancestors, that salt settles in the bones like a vow. When the wind cuts through my coat, it’s only reminding me whose work I belong to.

I’m standing where the tide knows my name without needing my voice to say it. That kind of knowing— it’s the closest thing I’ve found to mercy.

If I forget, salt my mouth until the truth burns clean again. If I falter, harden the ground so I remember what I stand on. If I shrink, widen the horizon until fear has no corner left to hide. If I go silent, let the horn in the fog call me back to the living.

⸻

This is the work: to remember, to make, to return— to carry others with me. To call the tide by its real name when I can hear it, and teach my breath to move in time with the sea.

We were never cargo. We were chorus. Still are. Still singing.

The song is the bridge. The bridge is the future.

The ocean is not blue. It is work. And the work is love in its hardest, truest form— a love that lifts, that names, that refuses to forget.

Because of this, I will not look away. I will not mistake rest for freedom. I will not mistake quiet for peace.

I will return to the water until the water returns to me. I will keep my hands open to the wind. I will speak, even when my voice is salt.

I will remember. And I will build.

the inbox blooms while the death toll updates. i double-click silence. i open the portal, and brace for impact. someone is grieving a breakup. someone wants to disappear. i say mm-hmm, say yes, say tell me more. i do not say: the world is burning.

i scroll before sessions just to confirm that the grief is still real. it always is. congo, sudan, gaza flicker behind the scheduler. the platform asks: would you like to send a reminder?

i write: client was tearful, grounded in the session, able to reflect. i do not write: my chest is a locked file. my jaw clicks from clenching the names i cannot say aloud. the session ends. i bill.

my tea goes cold between autoplays. the footage plays muted, but i can hear it anyway. a child’s name trends— not for surviving. i check for land acknowledgements and evacuation orders in the same breath.

i do not scream. i do not post. i do not sob between sessions. i eat lunch like i’m supposed to. it tastes like anesthesia.

a client thanks me for holding space. i want to say: the space is breaking.

i am splintered between the rubble and the rubric, between my ethics and the endless wars. between holding the line and losing it completely.

i google how to stay human and close the tab. i light a candle and forget what it’s for. i try to write a post and delete the words: this is not okay.

but i say thank you. i say take care.

i write another note. i name the hour. i call it progress.

“I am not interested in rescuing Black being(s) for the category of the “Human”, misunderstood as “Man”, or for the material conditions that they re/produce continue to produce our fast and slow deaths. I am interested in seeing and imagining responses to the terror visited on Black life and the ways we inhabit it, are inhabited by it, and refuse it. I am interested in the ways we live in and despite that terror. By considering that relationship between imaging and imagining in the registers of Black annotation and Black redaction, I want to think about what these images call forth. And I want to think through what they call on us to do, think, feel in the wake of slavery—which is to say, in an ongoing present of subjection and resistance.”

— Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, p. 116

you pulled me back in before i’d even stood all the way up hand in my hair mouth still wet your breath catching like you were trying to apologize with your hips

i didn’t say a word just slid down again let my knees hit the floor didn’t care if it hurt— not when your thighs were already shaking

you tasted like skin and sweat like the first tear into a mango’s flesh juice running before i could swallow and when you moaned— low, throat-closed, helpless— i knew you’d let me ruin you again

after we stayed still your breath warm against my cheek hands heavy on my shoulders before you kissed my fingers one by one like they were the ones that had started it

i did not leave quietly i left with the sound of a door unhinging

i counted nothing but the ways you built your survival from my exhaustion

you drank deep from the river i guarded until my hands split open from holding it wide

some hungers are teeth wearing the mask of open hands some silences are cages you only recognize once you’re free

i stay near to my voice even when it cuts and this time it cut us clean apart

---

you pressed me into shapes that were never mine to bear

folded my edges inward misnamed it peace

you poured your weight into the hollow of my back wrenched the breath from my ribs

you built a roof from my shoulders and lived beneath it while the beams split

the spine remembers every bend, every break

one day it stands— the rafters tremble— and never returns

---

i do not live in the shadow of what split me

i plant vertebrae like fence posts, pressing them into damp soil until the earth smells of rain and iron and answers to my name

my ribs curve open to the sky without permission

i let the wind thread my lungs and call it prayer i drink from the river and call it my own name

i keep the roof light— only what my shoulders welcome— and bones are not cages when you build them to breathe, when light pours through their windows

i became a scholar of grief by accident. because if i hadn’t, the grief might have swallowed me whole. because if i hadn’t, whiteness would have come for it turned it into content stripped it of meaning sold it as proof of progress.

because if i hadn’t, my pain—my hurt—my refusal to be pitied would have disappeared into silence. would have been lost to the archive or worse, used to build it.

i became a scholar of grief to protect what cannot be replicated. to honour what we carry. And i will not let them take that too.

found on a walking sign, half peeled, half legible. housing crisis? deport muslims. unclear if it’s fascism or mockery. as if that distinction ever mattered. the horror isn’t the message — it’s that it blends in. nothing shocks. just one more trace in a city that trades blame for shelter, displacement for safety, violence for policy.

got taller, this building. more glass. more echo. they call it growth. we remembered something else.

july 2018— after slāv, after kanata, after another season of voices stolen, then staged. we gathered here. we named what they wouldn’t. not just as protest. as refusal.

they built around it. more lights, more money, no redress. just steel stacked over silence.

and now that silver figure, blue-faced sentinel watching nothing. a monument to forgetting hollow as every apology we never heard.

but we carry the crack in the concrete. we remember because they designed it so we wouldn’t.

rigs still hanging. the crowd’s gone. just light, angles, and someone wrapping cables in the distance. no urgency. just the slow undoing of what passed through.

for one of my best ones. the candles held. so did we. strawberries, sugar, a whole lot of light.

not a performance of joy— the real thing. held in the breath, shared in the room.

this is how we stay.